Raking the Ashes

by Anne Fine

  But Geoff preferred not to think about it. And that, from his point of view, was that.

  If he’d been stupid, I am sure I could have let it go. I might even have been able to bring myself – by Doncaster, say – to come out with something emollient: ‘I’m sorry what I said about your dad upset you so.’ (The weasel marital apology: not sorry I said it – just sorry it upset you.) But anybody who can fix a jammed photocopier must have a working brain. So I was just annoyed at Geoff’s sheer stubbornness. I knew from the clipped way he brushed aside my questions on our choice of route that he was trying to make me feel like a naughty child who’d gone too far. And that led to our next argument.

  ‘Can we change places?’ I asked him after a while.

  ‘I’m quite all right,’ he said. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘I expect you are. It’s just that I would like to drive for a bit, please.’

  ‘Tilly, we’re nearly there.’

  ‘I’d like to drive, please. Would you stop the car.’ As if the very road were on my side, up popped the sign for a lay-by. ‘That will be fine,’ I said firmly.

  ‘Tilly—’

  ‘It is my car, Geoffrey.’

  He’d forgotten that. And, interestingly, that is what swung the matter. He started moving towards the inside lane. In the lay-by, the two of us switched places without exchanging a single word. I know what I was doing. I was refusing to be driven a single mile further by someone who wouldn’t talk to me. It’s a control thing, like picking up the bill after an argument in a restaurant because you can’t bear to be beholden to someone whom you’ve decided you don’t like.

  Not speaking seems a whole lot loftier when you are busy changing lanes. After ten miles or so, Geoff started talking. Not about his father. (That would have been too much of a climb-down – not to mention a topic of real interest.) About something utterly bland and forgettable, like weather or cars. But the message was definitely: end of sulk.

  Still, I kept concentrating on the road. And when, as we unpacked the car, he tried to wrap up our holiday by saying something really nice, I hurried out of earshot. When he came up to bed I was already pretending to be asleep, though I was back to planning my escape. I lay there with the ‘Sorry, Geoff, this isn’t working’ speech echoing round my brain, and ran through the pros and cons of selling the house and moving to a flat in the city. Finally I dozed, but only as lightly as I could, since I was determined to beat the alarm clock and switch it off before it woke him. In the morning, I didn’t even make toast in case the smell floated up the stairs. And I was safely outside on the doorstep a full ten minutes before the taxi arrived. I was determined not to hear a single word about our future till I had had the time to tell him that we didn’t have one.

  I flew up to Aberdeen with every nerve end charged for parting. So I blame the North Sea. Lean with your arms stretched flat along a railing, and stare out. From a rig deck there’s nothing to distract you: no strips of sand, no walkers on the beach, no rocks on which the breakers slap, and slide back down again in dark wet patterns. All that we have is waves. Great powerful, timeless, surging waves. They are mesmeric. For a few minutes or so, your brain keeps tossing up the stupid surface thoughts. ‘This will be here for eternity.’ ‘I could stand here for ever.’ ‘This will go on and on when I am dead.’ But after a while, you simply watch. And watch, and watch. On land, it’s cold or hunger that makes you move on in the end. We’re so wrapped up, we could stay warm as far north as the Arctic. And life’s so dull that all we do is eat too much, then snack on chocolate. It can be noisy, depending on who’s clanging about above or below. But if you choose the right spot, most of the hum of the generators blows away, and leaves you with just the wind whipping around you.

  In sets that sense of being tiny in the universe. An ant. An apple pip. Something so small and unregardable you may as well not exist. You are reminded of all the aeons you weren’t here, and no one knew or cared. You think of how, within a few years of your vanishing, things will be like that again. You look at all those waves and think, I am a blink in time. I go two ways. Sometimes I find it quite exhilarating. Thrilling. Inspiring. I feel as if I could go anywhere, do anything. Impatience seizes me. I want to pack in this small life and pick another. Choose to be anything. Fly!

  At other times in comes the void. I get the sense that life is worthless, pointless and drab, and nothing matters. A grey fog settles and clings. Usually I’m glad to get off a rig. On days like these, it makes no difference. I go through the motions, gather my stuff together and scramble aboard as usual. But it takes time to come back to myself and feel a person, not just a walking, talking ‘thing’ pacing out life on the planet.

  Back at the terminal, there was a message. ‘Please phone Geoff.’

  ‘I’m off home anyhow,’ I lied to Donald. But he had picked up a ringing telephone. ‘Oh, right. No, she’s still here.’

  He handed it to me.

  Geoffrey.

  ‘Hi, sweetheart. Back at the terminal, having a cup of tea with Donald before the taxi arrives?’

  I looked at the mug in my hand, with steam still rising. He could, I knew, have caught me almost any time, on almost any day, and got it almost as close. If a man goes to the trouble of asking you about your day and listening to your answers – triumphs and grumbles – and cares enough to remember, then he will learn how your weeks work. I could imagine some woman who adored Geoff making a call to say much the same to him. ‘Hi, Geoff. Are you busy explaining to Mrs Mackie the jobs that came in since she went off for lunch?’

  Someone.

  Not me.

  But still, the grey mist lifted. Believe me, I so wanted us to part that I tried clinging on to it. I almost felt myself trying to hug depression round me. But sad, weird moods come and go as they choose, and this one chose to go. All I was left with was a warm and loving feeling. This man so cared for me that, all through his day, he kept me firmly in his mind. He knew where I might be, and what I might be doing. Who I was with and how long it might take. I mattered to him. So I mattered.

  And suddenly, whether I could talk to him about his father mattered less.

  6

  IT WAS MINNA who first mentioned ‘Mummy’s Bump’ one weekend morning. I can’t remember why she came out with it, but the expression struck me at once.

  ‘You don’t suppose she’s pregnant?’ I whispered to Geoff as I passed him a cereal box to put back in the cupboard.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Frances, of course. Weren’t you listening? Minna said she has a “bump”.’

  Just at that moment, Harry came back in the kitchen to pick up his radio-controlled rat. Sensing that we were having a private conversation, he hung around, so it was quite a while before Geoff picked up the topic again. ‘Of course she wouldn’t be pregnant. Frances is far too old to start again.’

  ‘Geoff, she’s barely scraped forty! And Minna is only nine. It’s perfectly possible.’

  ‘Nonsense. Whose baby would she be having?’

  ‘Terence’s, of course.’

  ‘But they’ve split up again.’

  News to me. But at that moment the notion of Frances having a ‘bump’ intrigued me far more than the fact that Geoff evidently hadn’t bothered to keep me abreast of yet another milestone in his family. ‘Perhaps that’s why. Maybe Terence didn’t fancy being a father.’

  ‘Tilly, you’re mad.’

  Not mad. Just wrong. The real facts of the matter came home to us only a couple of Wednesday visits later, when Harry dumped a bigger load of stuff than usual on the hall floor. ‘Mum wants us to sleep over here, and for you to take us to school in the morning.’

  ‘Brilliant!’ said Geoffrey.

  ‘Is there a reason?’ I couldn’t help asking.

  Harry looked grave. ‘She’s seeing someone early about her lump.’

  ‘Oh, lump,’ I said, caught off guard. Harry gave me a look. ‘I thought it was “bump”,’ I admitted.

  ‘No. Lump
,’ said Harry. He seemed a hair’s breadth away from tears. I took it he’d picked up more than just the word, so put a warning hand on Geoffrey’s arm as I said cheerfully, ‘It’s good the two of you are sleeping over. Your dad was hoping you could stay a bit later tonight. He thought it would make a nice change to go to a film.’

  We all switch moods in an instant, but only children are honest enough not to try to conceal it. ‘Film?’ Harry was already bouncing up and down. ‘What, in town? Can we go to Ghost Train? Please! Everyone in my class has seen it already.’

  ‘Is it too scary for Minna?’

  We watched the struggle between longing and honesty. I let him off the hook. ‘I thought, if Minna stayed here with me, I could help her bake chocolate fingers to take to school tomorrow.’

  Minna looked up. ‘Or fairy cakes? Like the ones you made with Harry when I had the flu?’

  ‘Whichever you like.’

  So that was settled. Harry was distracted from his worries, and Minna, busy with her wooden spoon, turned really chatty. First, I heard all about her myriad little feuds in school. Then all about her triumph at the gym club. Finally, she mentioned how cross her mother had been when the oven packed in twice in one week, and I took the chance to drop the little question. ‘So where’s this lump of hers, then?’

  Minna let go of the mixing bowl to reach up and touch the side of her neck. I leaned across to wipe off the butter smear before it ran down to her collar. ‘Is it big?’

  ‘It’s getting bigger.’

  ‘Has she seen the doctor?’

  ‘She’s seen …’ Minna laid down the spoon to tick them off on her fingers. ‘Three doctors and two special doctors and a puncturist.’

  ‘Acupuncturist?’

  ‘Yes.’ Out came the bombshell. ‘And now she’s going to America and we’re to come and stay with you till she gets better.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Next week, when Terence has it sorted.’ She reached for the egg I’d been holding out, and fell silent with concentration for the time it took to crack it in the cup and whisk it creamy. I thought I might have to prompt her, but as soon as she’d tipped the first slither of beaten egg into her batter she came back to the subject of her own accord. ‘Terence’s cousin is a …’

  She stopped and stared at me with that old haunted, agonized look.

  ‘Surgeon?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Specialist?’

  It finally came to her. ‘Oncologist.’

  ‘That’s some word to remember!’

  She gave me one of her rare smiles. ‘Want to know how I do it? I think of pigs.’ She saw my blank look. ‘Oink, oink! Oinkologist!’

  It seemed as good a time as any to exit the conversation. I led her off the topic by going on to chat about two of Geoffrey’s own animal imitation specialities (braying like a donkey and mooing like a cow) and other matters. I knew the rest of the story would filter in when Frances rang, and it was comforting to feel that, just this once, I knew a little more than Geoffrey about what was happening in his family.

  Much good it did me. Geoffrey took the call. I stayed out of sight but, this time, I was listening hard. And when he came to find me and report, it was as clear as paint that he was telling only the half of it. I offered him the chance to come clean. ‘So Frances didn’t give you any idea how long she’d be gone? That seems a little strange.’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t expect she knows. From what I gather, it’s some sort of weird experimental place. You know, organic berries, yoga, imagining your red blood cells busy chewing up the cancer.’

  ‘White blood cells,’ I corrected automatically.

  ‘Whatever. Anyhow, I got the feeling the whole idea was that she let go of all her troubles and responsibilities to give her body a clear run to get better.’

  I made a face. I had no way of proving that all the assurances I’d overheard Geoff making had any relevance. (Yes, he’d make sure they had their dental inspections. No, he wouldn’t forget to pay next term’s gym-club fees.) But I was certainly suspicious enough to turn mean-spirited. ‘Still, sending your children round to someone else’s house indefinitely …’

  ‘I’m not just “someone else”.’

  ‘It’s not your house.’

  He bridled. ‘Are you suggesting I should have said no to offering a home to my own children?’

  ‘No. I just think it would have been nicer if you had said, at some point in the call, “I can’t for a moment imagine there’ll be a problem. But I will of course have to check with Tilly.”’

  ‘I think I did say something like that at one point.’

  ‘Geoff, as it happens, I was listening. And I know for a fact you didn’t.’

  Now he was getting ratty. ‘Well, if there’s no problem, why on earth should I have gone to the trouble of bothering to say it?’

  It was the careless little ‘bothering to’ that riled me. ‘Because this is my house. And I think you and Frances have a really bad habit of taking me too much for granted.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Tilly! The mother of my kids turns out to have cancer, and you’re just on about who owns this house!’

  And, put like that, it did sound very petty. But I was seething. For it did seem to me that there was always some great highfalutin reason why the two of them could act as if I didn’t count for anything whenever it suited them. I didn’t push the issue. Clearly it wasn’t the time. And Geoff was quite sincerely upset at the news about Frances. The children moved in only a few days later, and my suspicion that they’d be staying a whole lot longer than Geoff was actually letting on was strengthened by his wistful hint that I might let him dismantle the bunk bed and move Harry’s half into the room I’d always used as an office. (I turned a deaf ear.)

  The children started off as usual, with that same somewhat distant ‘politesse’ they’d always shown under our roof. But there’s a deal of difference between visiting and living, and as the days went by I saw a different side of both. Minna, for example, was still as quiet and undemanding as before, and it was the usual effort to get her to commit herself to even the smallest decision. But I began to notice that she could make her feelings clear by taking her time. I’d ask her, ‘Would you like to come with me to pick up the supper?’ Half an hour later the restaurant would ring. ‘Is there a problem? Your order’s sitting waiting,’ and Minna would still be sitting on the bottom stair, taking an age to pull on a sock or button up a shoe. I’d ask her to set for lunch, and though, each time I looked round, she’d be moving obediently between the cutlery drawer and the table, still, when the meal was ready, however long that took, her job was only half done. She ate at a snail’s pace. She took so long to get into her pyjamas that there was never time for a story. She never complained, never said no, never failed to agree about anything. But still she couldn’t have made her feelings about staying in our house more obvious. It was like living with a child who walked through glue.

  Harry, by contrast, shifted tirelessly from one room to another, a thin tuneless whistle seeping from between clenched teeth. He started every single one of the books Frances had sent along with him, and finished none. He fiddled with the controls on the radio till I could have slapped his fingers. He took to tormenting his sister. And shadows deepened round his eyes.

  ‘Talk to him, Geoff. He’s probably got it in his head his mother’s dying.’

  ‘What am I supposed to say?’

  We sat in mutual bafflement. What are the words for someone whose mother feels herself to be – probably is – in such great peril that she’s gone to Arizona for a ‘miracle cure’?

  ‘Tell him …’ I hesitated. Nothing seemed right. ‘Just get him talking.’

  ‘It’s not that easy, Til.’

  And yet it was. Night after night I woke to hear the struts of the bunk bed creaking like a galleon at sea. I’d pad through to pull the covers back over his thrashing limbs, and end up staying till I froze while Harry kept me, clinging
to company by explaining in pitiless detail why he had woken, or how he couldn’t sleep.

  It’s not surprising that in the end I cracked. ‘All right. Unfasten the bloody bunk bed and put his half in my study. At least that way I won’t be standing half the night.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Til.’

  Not sorry enough to get the boy talking himself, of course. And how I hated what I had to listen to, because poor Harry was consumed with foul intrusive thoughts. Every black tale he’d heard at school, every warped headline he’d seen in papers, ran riot through his brain.

  ‘So there was this murderer—’

  ‘Who told you this one, Harry?’

  ‘Kevin. His brother told him.’

  I’d sigh. Harry would pick up the story. ‘It’s true, Tilly. He murdered this girl on the beach, then turned her face down with her arms stuck in the sand as if she was doing press-ups. And when the police pulled her out, they found she only had stumps.’